When the penal state excludes four million voters

by Serge Halimi and
Loïc Wacquant

On 9 November, two days after the election, William Daley, Gore’s campaign manager, could hardly find words strong enough to castigate the Republicans’ culpable indifference to the “disenfranchisment” of thousands of electors in Florida - that is, the fact that the punch-card machines in prosperous Palm Beach county had rejected some 19,000 ballots. However, he proved much less indignant at the half-million Floridians barred from the polling stations by the penal system even though they no longer are under criminal justice supervision. Indeed, it turns out that Florida is national leader in the race for "criminal disenfranchisement," just ahead of Texas!

Due to the hypertrophic growth of the carceral system caused by the shift from the social-welfare to the penal management of poverty and social insecurity (1), 4m adults - corresponding to 2% of potential voters and 15% of African-American adult males - were unable to take part in the vote, having lost their civil rights as a result of a felony conviction. Forty-six of the 50 states of the Union forbid prisoners from voting (1.2m inmates). Thirty-two states also exclude convicts released on parole (453,000 former prisoners) and 29 states do the same to people on probation (yet another million). Last, something which no other parliamentary democracy in the world does, 14 states inflict lifetime disenfranchisment on former convicts, thus banishing another 1.4m US citizens from ever voting, even though they have fully repaid their debt to society.

Florida automatically removes from its electoral registers its 63,700 prison inmates (close to the total prison population of England), 9,200 parolees, 137,200 probationers and a staggering 647,000 former felons. Texas does almost as well, with 132,400 prisoners, 112,600 parolees, 234,200 on probation and 130,800 former convicts who have to wait two years before recovering their civic rights. In addition to Florida and Texas, four other states - Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia and Wyoming - prevent over 4% of their adult population from voting on penal grounds.

African American men, who benefit from a de facto "carceral affirmative action" policy which gives them priority access to US penitentiaries (they make up only 7% of the country’s adult population but 55% of admissions to prison), are also the first to be disenfranchised by means of the criminal justice system. Here again, Florida leads the pack, since 31% of all African American men residing in the Sunshine State have lost the right to vote on criminal grounds (2). A short 35 years after the Civil Rights movement finally gained blacks effective access to the ballot box (with the Voting Rights Act of 1964), this right has been taken back by the penal system via legal dispositions that are of dubious constitutional validity and violate international conventions on human rights which the US has ratified.